New house with pool and first test- Free Chlorine is ~16ppm - sheesh!

[bertschb]

No reason to test that often.

It is if you're a newbie and screwed up the first time you tried adding anything to your pool

I realize that since I'm done adding acid for now I don't need to test pH as often. Do you have a guess as to how long it might take for pH to rise back to 7.8 or how long it will take for TA to drop? Water temp is down to 51.

 

[mknauss]

pH rise can be hours or days. Hard to say. The TA falls each time you add acid.

 

[bertschb]

pH rise can be hours or days. Hard to say. The TA falls each time you add acid.

k, thanks again Marty! You've been very helpful.

 

[bertschb]

OK. Pretty typical for a pool company maintenance.

Add acid to lower the the pH from 8 to 7.4. That will lower your TA a bit. When the pH reaches 8 again, repeat. Test the TA each time you need to add acid. You will scale up your SWCG and get water line scale pretty quickly with high pH and high TA.

Update:
Since we bought our house nearly two weeks ago I've managed to drop TA from 240 down to 200 today. That's after adding a lot of acid every couple of days. I add acid until pH drops to 7.4 then let it rise back up to around 7.8 then rinse and repeat. FC is 8.0 right now but has been in the 7.0 range for a week or so. The lowest FC got was 5.5 (I've been adjusting pump run times and SWCG settings plus water temp has dropped below 52 degrees for several days now so SWCG is off most of the time).

At this rate, it will take another month or two (and several more gallons of acid) to get TA down to where it should be.

 

[bertschb]

Update #2:
I'm still working to reduce TA. When we bought the house one month ago, TA was 240. It's now down to 125. I added a "solar" pool cover about a week ago to try to reduce temperature loss overnight so the SWCG would continue operating. I leave it on the pool overnight. Now I'm thinking this will extend the process of reducing TA because it will slow down the increase in pH through aeration which means I can't add as much acid. Is this correct? Should I leave the pool cover off until I finally get TA under control?

BTW, I replaced about 25% of the water a week ago over two days (about 12% each day) in an effort to speed up the reduction in TA and also to reduce my CYA and CH. All three dropped so that seemed to help. And yes, I added salt to make up for the loss.

 

[Newdude]

You only need one or two more rounds of MA and the TA will be fine. Under 110 the TA will usually settle wherever it wants to be, so do one last cycle at 110/115 and let it be after that.

It's up to you if you want to leave the cover off and get there a couple of days faster, or use the cover and take a bit longer. You're almost there either way.

 

[bertschb]

It's up to you if you want to leave the cover off and get there a couple of days faster...

Thanks for the feedback. I think I'll leave the cover off to speed things up - a bit.